Holocaust Remembrance for Tisha B’Av

Program Schedule

• Rescue your Yellow Candles from your building now or before about one month before Tisha B’Av. 
• Arrange for your Rabbi or Lay Leader to provide Tisha B’Av letter and meditation prayer to be included with your Yellow Candle™ delivery.
• IF MAILING: PACK YOUR CANDLES to ensure delivery before Tisha B’Av.
  • Either send the candles home with your volunteers for packing and labeling
  • Or spread out your “packing team” in your shul’s social hall.
• Deliver the Yellow Candles in their boxes to the Post Office. Please allow three weeks for 3rd class mail delivery.
  •  Set aside some Yellow Candles™ for people to come in and pick-up, because they will hear about it from others.
• Submit Yellow Candles for Tisha B’Av flyers to your webmaster for inclusion on your website(s). Arrange calendar notices, e-blasts, bulletins, etc., one month before Tisha B’Av.
  • Provide announcements to read at services, etc., reminding the community to light their Yellow Candle™ for Tisha B’Av.
  • Submit a press release to local media outlets—follow-up with telephone calls.
• Encourage the Rabbi and leaders to post & share the light your Yellow Candle message- Fight Anti-Semitism and support Holocaust Remembrance. Shine Yellow Candles for Tisha B’Av.
• Tisha B’Av is a fast day.
• Share photographs and reports on social media such as Twitter, on Instagram at #yhyellowcandle, and on Facebook at facebook.com/YellowCandles

Sample Rabbi Letter

(On Your Letterhead)

This unusual year, we are combining both Tisha B’av, the culmination of a three-week period of mourning, with Holocaust Remembrance, by sharing the Shoah Yellow Candle™ at the same time. Please light your Yellow Candle on Saturday evening after Wednesday, July 26, 2023. Then attend the virtual Tisha B’av commemoration on Sunday. The service link is available on the synagogue website.

The Jewish people are committed to memory.  Our entire historical consciousness is based on the memory of our people’s activities throughout history. In our generation, it is our task to remember the Shoah, the horrible destruction of our people during World War II. What was destroyed were human lives and human potential, not merely Jewish culture but new possibilities for Jewish creativity, not simply six million Jews but the generations that might have come from them.

Thus, it is incumbent upon us to remember what we lost. I highly commend our own Men’s Club and The Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs for the Shoah Candle Program.  It allows us to bring the memory of our loss into our homes through the ritualized lighting of the yellow Shoah Yahrzeit candle.

I encourage you to light the candle and place it by your window in the same way that you place the Hanukkah candles for all to see. I also encourage you to contribute to the Program to ensure that we may continue it in the years to come.  Give your contributions in memory of those who perished during the Holocaust, and honor the generations of their families that were never born.

Light a Candle, Preserve a Memory! ^TM

B’Shalom,

{Signature} 

Rabbi {insert name}

Meditation

In these memorable days, as I light this Shoah Yellow Candle™, I vow never to forget the lives of the Jewish men, women, and children who are symbolized by this flame.  They were tortured and brutalized by human beings who acted like beasts; their lives were taken in cruelty.  May we be inspired to learn more about our six million brothers and sisters as individuals and as communities, to recall their memory throughout the year so that they will not suffer a double death.   To that end, I now memorialize the name and life of (Name Below), who, as a child was denied an entire lifetime of dreams and hope. May I embody the beauty and goodness of what could have been had s/he lived.  May we recall not only the terror of their deaths but also the splendor of their lives.  May the memory of their lives inspire us to hallow our own lives and live meaningful Jewish lives so that we may help ensure that part of who they were shall always endure